posted at 4:01 pm on February 26, 2013 by Allahpundit

C’mon. What’s his next move, ordering the Border Patrol to stand down because he supposedly can’t afford to pay them? Oh, right. That is his next move.

This makes me more enthusiastic about the sequester, just because now I’m curious to see how derelict he’s willing to be in his duties to in the name of putting political pressure on the GOP. Next up: Suspending TSA checkpoints at America’s airports, maybe? Where else is he going to find two percent savings in three-plus trillion in spending?

In a highly unusual move, federal immigration officials have released hundreds of detainees from immigration detention centers around the country in an effort to save money as automatic budget cuts loom in Washington, officials said…

The agency, Ms. Christensen added, “is continuing to prosecute their cases in immigration court and, when ordered, will seek their removal from the country.”

Officials did not reveal precisely how many detainees were released or where the releases took place, but immigrants’ advocates around the country have been reporting that hundreds of detainees were freed in numerous locations , including Hudson County, N.J.; Polk County, Texas; Broward County, Fla.; and New Orleans; and from centers in Arizona, Alabama, Georgia and New York.

While immigration officials occasionally free detainees on supervised release, this mass release — so many in such a short span of time — appears to be unprecedented in recent memory, immigration advocates said.

Mark Krikorian calls this the “never let a sequester go to waste” strategy, in which O achieves two goals in one fell swoop — turning up the heat on the GOP to cave on cuts, yes, but also tossing the amnesty fans in his base a bone by reducing border enforcement on the very day that he’s meeting with McCain and Graham at the White House to talk immigration reform. Question for liberals: If he’s suddenly all about penny-pinching in base-pleasing ways, how about getting him to cancel the next year of federal marijuana prosecutions for nonviolent offenders instead? After all, the “waves” of illegals released today will all be legal soon enough. If you’re looking to seize an opportunity for a little emergency cost-cutting social engineering, rolling back the drug war is in more dire need of a jumpstart than immigration.

Via Mediaite, here’s Andrew Napolitano musing about the legal consequences for a president who deliberately seeks to make the federal government perform more poorly than it has to.